When the St. Paul-based Schubert Club decided to host the first artist-in-residence in its 137-year history, it’s hard to imagine a more ideal choice than Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti. Not only has the 31-year-old virtuoso been a star soloist since her teen years, but you’d be hard pressed to find a more dedicated music education advocate, for when she’s not onstage performing, she’s usually in a classroom convincing kids to get serious about music. No wonder Queen Elizabeth recently named her a Commander of the British Empire, one notch down from knighthood.

For Twin Cities audiences, her Schubert Club residency reaches its apex this weekend with a pair of International Artist Series recitals at the Ordway Concert Hall. The first was Friday evening, and it left little doubt that Benedetti is one magnificent talent, her abilities only matched by her ambitiousness. Placing a mountainous challenge before herself, she not only performed sonatas by Sergei Prokofiev and Richard Strauss with Ukrainian pianist Alexei Grynyuk, but took the stage alone for solo violin works by J.S. Bach and an American composer who stands astride jazz and classical music, Wynton Marsalis.

The result was an extraordinarily satisfying concert that went in four distinctly different directions, stylistically. Not only did Benedetti show off her versatility, she demonstrated that she might just be brilliant with whatever repertoire she touches.

It takes fortitude to open a concert with the Chaconne from Bach’s Second Violin Partita, which has become the most familiar solo violin work in that composer’s output. And deservedly so, for it’s a powerful piece, a dark night of the soul believed to have been written as Bach processed the death of his first wife. Benedetti proved magnetic as she surehandedly guided us through its emotion-saturated twists and turns, peaks and valleys. Her brusque, burly upbeats proved particularly affecting when they sounded like sobbing inhalations amid the sad arpeggios near the Chaconne’s conclusion.

On a program from four centuries, Prokofiev represented the 20th with his Second Violin Sonata, and it’s a curious piece that often sounds a great distance away from the Soviet Union in the last years of World War II. While pianist Grynyuk gave the music a dark, romantic foundation, Benedetti seemed in search of the sorrow hiding within it. An urgent agitation emerged in the Presto, giving way to a lonely section that sounded like survivor’s guilt. She eschewed drama in favor of a delicacy that stood in stark contrast to Grynyuk’s emphatic assertions.

Benedetti again took the stage alone to open the concert’s second half, this time with something radically different from everything around it. Wynton Marsalis may be American, but the “Fiddle Dance Suite” that he wrote for Benedetti had never been performed in the U.S. until Friday. While the melodies sounded very much from the school of Stephen Foster and his southern contemporaries, Marsalis clearly wrote the suite with Benedetti’s classical chops in mind, most notably during the fiery opening. For someone from Scotland, the violinist has a fine feel for the blues and the languor of a southern summer. Most memorable was when she tore furiously into some up-tempo bluegrass on the finale, shredding the horsehair on her bow and serving a reminder of how Scotland’s Celtic fiddling tradition found a home in Appalachia.

After that, Richard Strauss’ 1887 Sonata proved anticlimactic. Written at age 23 before the composer truly found his voice, it was an opportunity for both Benedetti and Grynyuk to open the floodgates and release a gully washer of schmaltz and lyricism. The piano rumbled and splashed like a turbulent sea, Grynyuk filling the music with the kind of flamboyant flourishes associated with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. While surely Benedetti deserved a romantic aria after all of that furious bowing, I came away thinking there’s a reason you don’t hear this slice of Strauss juvenilia very often. But let’s just call it a soft landing after a glorious flight.

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